by Amy Benson
Life is full of such precipices. Just now, for example, I am standing at the edge of honesty, afraid to keep talking for what I might say. I have a story to tell, and, though I write and write about the sparkling-eyed boy, I haven’t told it yet. To imagine doing so makes me feel naked, naked like a foot, like the red, wrinkled sole of a foot. And if I keep talking, I’ll tell you things I never intended, which may, for just that very reason, seem like the only truth.
Once, as an undergraduate, I had to read at a feminist literary conference. My poem was long and it just happened to be about rape and there just happened to be a big crowd, so I was nervous and my voice shook as if I were on the verge of tears all the way through it. As if it were some kind of therapy session. I wanted to say, honestly, This is not me, it’s made up! But for once I looked authentic. They had decided I was raw, laid open, uncensored. Self-consciously silent, I found my seat in a wash of eager or embarrassed sympathy.
He wasn’t the sort of boy girls take to immediately. He was gawky and chatty and teasing. He wanted attention. He felt things, and—it seems an odd way to put this, since he’s one of the only men I know now who does physical work for a living—he was almost feminine in this way. You could tell the cool, distant boys didn’t respect him. They cuffed him on the head.
One moment my sister and I had been alone, together, thirteen and eleven, spending another summer in this wild corner of the Great Lakes, as we had done all of our lives, an occasional older cousin our only company. My grandfather, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents homesteaded there—a narrow survival few attempted. And the score was similar for us: a wilderness without people; one little girl, a second little girl, and many green and breathing creatures. Then suddenly we had a gang, mostly boys, mostly related to one another (and to us, we squirmingly realized years later—seventh or eighth cousins), mostly flirting with my sister. Our parents were horrified, their elder daughter clearly ripening. But, inexplicably to me of the sexy sister (how could the same swimming suit look so different on me?), the sparkling-eyed boy, distant cousin, geek, was always by my side. At first, I tolerated his liking me. I was one of those terrible girls who craves adoration but has no intention of being “caught” by her admirer. Worst of all, girls like me, they never admit that’s what they’re doing. We were “just friends,” I would insist. We went on like this for years—I was trying to float, innocent, above the world, and if he couldn’t understand the purer attractions of platonic love (read: of his unreturned devotion), then that was his problem. How early we’re capable of tiny evils. How early we’re able to need from little unstitchable wounds. But that’s not the end of the story, not my final act of regret.
Five years later, the summer before my senior year of high school, things changed between the sparkling-eyed boy and me. My parents and I returned to that fishing camp in Ontario before going to our cabin. We drove forever on gravel roads, flew in a seaplane over thick rugs of evergreens that maybe no one will ever cut down. The year before, the sparkling-eyed boy and his best friend had gone with us, but they didn’t have the money this year. Our guide, the same guide we’d had the year before, asked me where they were, asked, Isn’t —— your boyfriend? “No.” I laughed discreetly. “We’re just friends.” But I seemed to recall something of last year—his shadow cast over the side of our little aluminum boats. And the smell of pine needles and the cleanest water I have ever seen—I believe I confused those scents with him. Strips of electric light had bounced across our T-shirts, the water generous and indiscriminate with its beauty. We had been dressed up in nature: fish guts, wood smoke, pollen, lake-soaked jeans. He had carried me down to the water and threatened to throw me in. I could smell the heat of his chest, his neck, feel his arms pinching into my thigh, my rib cage, but gently, as if what he really wanted was to comb out my hair and feed me soup. “No. We’re just friends.”
But I cast endlessly that day, my legs hooked over the side of the boat, the rims of my ears bubbling under the sun, and wondered: What kind of friends are we? I caught a few bright fish, and I came up with an answer. I never laughed as much, or, lately, hardly at all, as I did with him. I missed him. I wanted him to tease me, to stick so closely to me that people mistook him for my boyfriend—until I mistook him for my boyfriend.
I think that there can be no return for constancy. Payment is not a word we should be allowed to use with one another. Let me tell you, back then I wore hair spray, my skin was awash in tiny taupe freckles, I was just discovering the Beatles years too late, my armpits usually smelled like baby powder. Back then he was already on his own, working for a drywaller in a nearby town, his grin was easy, there was fear zippered around the edges of his hazel eyes, he took two or three showers a day. What could we possibly pay each other? To avoid crushing each other’s smooth-skinned selves, we would have to have been impossibly good. It is not possible to be that good.
So we came back to our summer home. We didn’t have a phone line then, so any contact we made had to be visual. Thus, I looked for the sparkling-eyed boy. Or rather, I wanted him to know I’d returned so that he might look for me. I pictured some scene in which the sparkling-eyed boy, like an acolyte who’s convinced of his lot in life, would take up his post by my side with the acquiescence of the perpetually rejected. I imagined being like a priestess, turning on him my eyes-too-bright-to-be-looked-upon, surprising, delighting him, making him eternally grateful with the return of his affections. How, I ask you, can you love when you see yourself as a prize to be awarded? Nevertheless, that’s how it started: I suddenly realized that I liked the sparkling-eyed boy.
Of course everyone knows that experience is never as tidy as the stories we cull from it; and memory is even worse—it’s just the story we tell ourselves enough times it sticks. But when we tell stories of love, we need plot points and explanations. If I were true to experience, I would stand here incoherent, twisting my hands.
Let me offer another version. Earlier that winter, I had become fascinated with, terrified by, signs of plenty all around me. My meals were discreetly whittled down to nothing. I became a very sloppy eater; large mouthfuls fell from me everywhere. I lovingly chewed on air, lingered compulsively over shadowy meals. I learned to tell lies by the dainty fistful. I dirtied plates with food I fed to my dog and left them conspicuously in the sink. I began to shake with cold in the full sunlight, to lie awake all night—a teenage insomniac—and to sag under the effort it took to drive a wedge between myself and the world. In short, within three months, I was able to stand, starved, proudly hobbled, and say, “Here! Here is all that I am not!” Thus I learned late-twentieth-century love—I came to love bone and hollow, shadow and shoulder wing. And I wouldn’t let anyone touch me.
But the sparkling-eyed boy was none of these things. He was the plenty that allows such love. (That is, we wouldn’t survive if everyone waned and no one waxed.) No—that’s not right. He was the plenty and the hungry stare that imagined that I might sate him.
So perhaps I came to love the sparkling-eyed boy because otherwise I might have fallen into a clatter of bones. And the rest is true: I came back from Canada, restless to be filled out with the shadow of the boy. Only, for the first time in many years, he did not come racing down my road.
But what have I done? If I have offered up my own desire as a symptom of starvation, can I honestly still offer the desire of the boy as desire unmitigatedly for me? Sometimes I worry that I have painted a picture of the sparkling-eyed boy surrounded by sturdy pines: natural man, an Adam untouched by the myths of brutality of human love, gazing naively on an Eve uncontrollably sullied by her historical moment. There we were, standing on opposite sides of the garden, me with the pulp of apple along my gums, him with a rumbling stomach.
My god, there are so many myths to sort through and discard. This picture is all wrong! I was not that Eve; he was not that Adam. You see, the sparkling-eyed boy was in the rather startling—and emasculating—position of lacking a mother. Not ev
en the thickest clots of forest, the most expansive gestures of water, can keep me from putting Freud into play.
She had run off with another man a few years before and left a husband, a college-bound daughter, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence. These three were left in a small house in a town with only a bar/general store, a post office, and a gas station/bait store. All I can think now is how can a boy become a man while pining mortally for a mother who has not chosen him above all other earthly things? If those of us around him who called ourselves “friend” had been able blindly to grope the shapes of bereavement in his face with literate fingers, we would not have been surprised if the face of the sparkling-eyed boy told us terrible things.
It’s shocking to the ego to think of us this way, but what if he had already rehearsed the role of male pining for inaccessible, all-important female before he cast me in the drama?
…
I’m killing all of the romance here. I’ll try again.
Water is the great reflector. It can mirror the elusive cloud back to itself so that, frankly, it understands itself better than before. So when the sparkling-eyed boy didn’t come to me that summer, I did what I always do when my heart would drag me to the bottom if it got the chance. I consulted the water.
Despite its hypnotic dappling, its endless enthusiasm for making the same wave over and over, water seems to say, “I would make an even bigger noise when I hit the shore if I could.” So, if the sparkling-eyed boy wasn’t now coming to me, I would have to go to him. I sent a message through one of his friends—a sort of presumptuous I’m-ready-for-you-now message. I was not, as you can imagine, versed in the proper etiquette for wooing anyone. I had no sense that he might have a life of his own that I might be disrupting, or that I would not be eternally attractive to him. I couldn’t imagine him as a fully etched human being, angry at my assumptions. I can imagine that now, but then I told this friend of his that I liked him in “that way.” And he sent me a letter.
I kept it. It’s dated July 11, 1988, and it was stamped and mailed to me even though he lived not three miles away. He says he’s lying in bed in the middle of the night, writing the letter. (I’m sure I had never imagined a boy alone in that quiet, wide-open time of night, shirtless and propped up over a notebook. I thought quiet was the province of girls, who, it seemed to me, had more cause for sleeplessness. But he gave me this image of himself, alone, the buzz of the day extinguished.) He tells me what I’d known—that he’s “liked me very much” for a long time. Then he chides me, tells me he thought he knew me until I refused him. (He was instinctively clever: When someone says he knows you and your actions have betrayed your true self, who are you to argue? I couldn’t resist someone who both knew and wanted me.) He said, in adolescent dramatics, that he “almost died.” I’d made him accept what he didn’t want to. (All of the moments of warmth between us made him trust his emotions to me, moments alone with him when we didn’t have to pretend anything for anyone—riding in his car, laughing and fussing over the tape deck; throwing the stick for my dog until her gums bled. I wonder about all of the moments that made his father trust his mother.) He said he didn’t know where to start with me, so he was writing this letter, telling me he would “give it a try.”
In the part of the letter that says the most, though, he writes about the weeklong trip to Florida he’s about to take with his cousin the next day. He says he wishes he could spend that time with me, but that he’s “never been anywhere before” so he’s still going. I think, now, of an eighteen-year-old who has been almost nowhere outside of the U.P., yearning to go to Florida because it’s somewhere. This statement seems to loom over our lives: he’s never been anywhere before, and Florida is somewhere.
I suppose, god help me, that at the time I thought it was a vaguely dissatisfying love letter. Though I read it now in its full poignancy: as a portrait of a boy confused, earnest, longing for experience and love, a bit angry I had made him wait so long, fully cognizant of what he might be lacking and of the difficult choices that lay ahead of him. But at the time I wanted more devotion, more superlatives, more power. I wanted to take his strength as my own. When did I read it correctly? Or am I still not getting it right?
He went to Florida. And when he returned a week later, we started “going out.” I went to his baseball games; we went to the beach; he came down and played cards with my mom and me as he’d always done; we argued about music; I helped him bale hay and work on building his father’s house—I still have the scar on my knee from when I slid down the shingles of the roof. We kissed and rolled around a bit. We lay on his bed—I’d never lain with a boy on a bed before—and whispered to each other. He told me what he’d done in the past and with whom. I told him I hadn’t done it yet and no one had even . . . you know . . . touched me on the bra. I don’t know if he believed me. Though we never removed one article of clothing, I felt thin and right against his chest.
But then something remarkable happened. With a month of summer left, he stopped coming to see me. He just dropped out of my life. The first time I knew something was wrong was when he didn’t show up to take me home from the job I’d gotten washing dishes at the local bar/ restaurant. I was shaking from my dinner of coffee and Sweet’N Low. I sat in the parking lot, swatting mosquitoes and nursing my pruned hands, but he never came, and it seemed to me that growing up was merely the process of becoming more and more damaged.
I did nothing. I had no more wooing left in me—my soul was not generous; it was even thinner than I was. Gradually, I became a specter. The starvation wasn’t logical. There didn’t seem to be any reason why it had started in the first place, and losing the sparkling-eyed boy didn’t escalate it. Though scantily, I was eating. But I was haunting the countryside. I spent my days alone. My sister, barely able to tolerate any of us, hadn’t returned from college. My dad, afraid of losing his drafting job, martyred himself alone in Detroit. And my mother, up north with me, enjoyed her first breath of freedom, one from which she wouldn’t be able to return. At the end of the summer, she would tell my sister and me that she would be leaving my father. Even in the moment, though, I knew somehow that skeins wound for years were unraveling. My ballast was gone, and for a good part of every day I drove my mother’s car, weaving around on the back roads, allowing myself a few times a week to pass by the sparkling-eyed boy’s house or the construction site where I thought he might be working that day. I never saw him, though. Mostly I just hoped I would get lost on some of the barely marked roads through the woods and the old fields homesteaders had abandoned long ago. I was reduced to a pale jumble of hurt with sprayed hair in a maroon Olds-mobile.
I began every once in a while to pull over and pick wildflowers along the side of the road or deep in the fields. And perhaps, even though I was a deeply ridiculous character, a character L. M. Montgomery might be proud of—a girl alone in nature, plucking flowers, sighing, on the verge of poetry—for the first time in my life I was acting without any hope of cutting a romantic figure. I hoped, in fact, that I was invisible. Audienceless. It was embarrassing, toting home armload after armload of wildflowers because that was all I could think to do with myself. The deep velvet car seats were stained with their pollen. I guess I was, though I could never admit it, heartbroken over the sparkling-eyed boy. When nothing around me was fecund—not my body, not my family, not my love with the sparkling-eyed boy, I turned to the earth and gathered up its most extravagant bounty, its riotous sex. The flowers bloomed with vigor, without shame, calling the world to them.
I didn’t see him again until the end of the summer at the annual Fireman’s Day picnic and dance. That night at the dance, he walked into the Township Hall with a few of his friends, and, as he passed me, he pinched the skin of my back and said, “Ooooh, I think you’re getting fat.” It’s so unfair that we live what we don’t understand, and then understand when we can no longer live it. I didn’t hear the fear in his voice, the anger that was fear that was love in the sharp end of his fi
ngertips. I was dizzy with anger and shame: either he was mocking me or he really did think I was fat. He was cruel, a million miles away, I thought. We didn’t speak the rest of the night, and then I went home for my senior year.
But that’s not how things ended finally between us. My parents and I drove up to the U.P. the next Memorial Day weekend. (Though they were separating, she was still taking care of him.) I told myself I was long past mourning—I didn’t care about him or the dissolution of my parents’ marriage or my sister’s distance. I had a trip to England planned for later that summer, and then college with my best friend, and huge, unwieldy dreams that didn’t include even one heartache. I was in control again, breezy and unflinching. I wanted people to know I could go anywhere, do anything. And when I saw him at a community center dance on Saturday night, I was a chiseled ice sculpture of a girl. The light went right through me; I reflected nothing back to him. But I grinned and sparkled at other people I knew until I left proudly alone without looking back. But he caught up with me in the parking lot.
“Amy,” he said, “wait up a minute. Please.”
I paused, looking at him silently, one eyebrow arched nearly to my hairline.
“I know you probably don’t want to talk to me, but can we, I don’t know, just take a ride?” He was intense and shuffling at the same time.
Precipice. Who was watching? What would my future say about this moment?
“I don’t know, ——. I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”
“Please. Let’s just go for a drive.” Was this the old supplicant? I’m shamed to say I needed this, needed to imagine myself loved more than I loved. I still do. I agreed stiffly and we rode for a long time in the cab of his pickup truck without speaking. When I sighed loudly and said I should get back, he pulled onto a dirt road and parked the truck.